Outliers

additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.

Their world—their culture and generation and family history—gave them the greatest of opportunities.

communication works only when the listener is capable of paying close attention, and it works only if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time, in order to unwind each other’s meanings.

Alan Schoenfeld, a math professor at Berkeley,

sense of entitlement

The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority.

It is headquartered in the prestigious office building known as Black Rock.

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the

What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They le

The first lesson is that Friedman was willing to work hard, take responsibility for himself, and put himself through school. But the second, perhaps more important lesson is that he happened to come along at a time in America when if you were willing to work hard, you could take responsibility for yourself and put yourself through school.